• Launchpad Entry: qa-m-improving-communication

• Created:

• Contributors: ubuntu-qa team

• Packages affected:

Summary

A session where we're going to discuss how to improve the communication with our community on Mailing lists, IRC Meetings, events, etc.

Rationale

The QA team could do much better with communication. IRC meetings have less a less participation from the community and Canonical QA members, the QA blog is not that used and the meeting notes are not send to the mailing list.

We need to identify the several problems that we are having in the QA team in terms of communication.

User stories

• charlie-tca is an active tester and triager, but he cannot attend the QA meetings in the current time (17:00UTC). As no notes are never sent to the ubuntu-qa list, he never keeps up on what is going on.
• Paul would like to have updates on what the QA team is doing, but the weekly newsletter never shows anything about QA. The QA Blog only has bug day announcements.

Design

Meetings

We will rotate the chair of the meetings every week. The chair will take care of: setting up the agenda and call for topics, drive the meeting and send meeting notes to the mailing list. To prepare the agenda, the chair can use the following template, as some of the topics are recurrent.

We will rotate the time every week, having two fixed times. First week will be 17:00 and the following week 17:00 - 8 or 17:00 + 8. Both are available. We will set up a doodle poll to select the meeting times.

We need a way to measure participation. 6 weeks after these changes have been put in place, we will check if the participation raised and we will also ask for feedback in the mailing list.

Meeting Template

• Actions from previous meetings
• Small roundtable
• SRU status
• Bug day status
• "Featured team" (if we have one for that meeting)
• Any items to send to the newsletter?
• Selection of the chair for week+2

Blog

• The design team has a website (http://design.canonical.com) that aggreates their blogs and it also has ways to introduce content in it. We would change the current landpage (http://qa.ubuntu.com) for this wordpress instance. We will add a Ubuntu template for it.

Newsletter

The Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter is a good way to communicate news to a broader audience. Developers or people actively committed in one of the teams usually don't read the newsletter, as they normally are aware of what is happening with mailing list. But if we want to reach a wider audience, sending regular announcements to the newsletter seems like a good idea.

During the IRC meeting there will be a recurrent topic about the newsletter at the end of the meeeting. We will discuss if anything that was said during the meeting could be of interest and we will select who is writing it and send it to the newsletter.

Action Items

• [xdatap1] Prepare the doodle poll asking for fixed meeting times (17:00UTC is fixed, we need another one)
• [apulido] Prepare the announcement to the ubuntu-qa team about what was decided about meetings and asking members to vote
• [apulido] Talk with the design team about creating a template for wordpress for Ubuntu
• [apulido] File an RT ticket to get a wordpress instance running in qa.ubuntu.com
• Prepare the call for feedback to send to the ubuntu-qa mailing list
• Study how the participation increased (or decreased) and send feedback to the mailing list

BoF agenda and discussion

Agenda

• Meetings
  • Small round table
  • Rotation on chairing / sending notes
  • "Featured team"
• Mailing lists
  • ubuntu-qa
  • ubuntu-bugsquad
• Blogs
  • QA blog
  • Personal blogs
• Newsletters
• Twitter

Discussion

• Meetings
  • The feel Canonical QA team
  • We don't ask the community (call for topics)

  • LoCo Teams

  • Brainstorming
  • Making decissions
  • Lack of agenda
  • Roundtable per team
  • rotation on chairing / sending notes
  • Suggestion on alternate times - 2 fixed times
    • Set up a doodle poll to ask for times - Paolo
  • Selecting the chair at least 2 weeks in advance
  • We need a way to mesure participation
  • Way to (automatically) send transcript of meeting notes to mailing list
  • "Featured team"
    • Representatives from other teams v.s. QA people only
• Mailing lists
  • ubuntu-qa
    • Introducing themselves, and then you don't hear from them
    • Pointing people to documentation - Once a cycle.
  • ubuntu-bugsquad
    • A way to communicate ways to help
    • Bug conversation needs to happen here
  • ubuntu-bugcontrol
    • Only for reviewing applications to the bug control
    • apport crashes
• Mentoring?
  • Having a email template to send to new people
  • A way to help people finding a job
• Blogs
  • QA blog
  • Personal blogs
  • The design team has a blog that also aggregates their personal blogs.
    • We want that!!!!
• Newsletters
  • Good for people not that involved
• Twitter

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